Building and Installing

npm install phantomjs

Or grab the source and

node ./install.js

What this installer is really doing is just grabbing a particular "blessed" (by
this module) version of Phantom. As new versions of Phantom are released
and vetted, this module will be updated accordingly.

Running

bin/phantomjs [phantom arguments]

And npm will install a link to the binary in node_modules/.bin as
it is wont to do.

Running via node

The package exports a path string that contains the path to the
phantomjs binary/executable.

Below is an example of using this package via node.

var path =require('path')

var childProcess =require('child_process')

var phantomjs =require('phantomjs')

var binPath =phantomjs.path

var childArgs =[

path.join(__dirname,'phantomjs-script.js'),

'some other argument (passed to phantomjs script)'

]

childProcess.execFile(binPath, childArgs,function(err,stdout,stderr){

// handle results

})

Versioning

The major and minor number tracks the version of PhantomJS that will be
installed. The patch number is incremented when there is either an installer
update or a patch build of the phantom binary.

Using PhantomJS from disk

If you plan to install phantomjs many times on a single machine, you can
install the phantomjs binary on PATH. The installer will automatically detect
and use that for non-global installs.

Cross-Platform Repositories

PhantomJS needs to be compiled separately for each platform. This installer
finds a prebuilt binary for your operating system, and downloads it.

If you check your dependencies into git, and work on a cross-platform
team, then you need to tell NPM to rebuild any platform-specific dependencies. Run

npm rebuild

as part of your build process. This problem is not specific to PhantomJS, and this
solution will work for any NodeJS package with native or platform-specific code.

If you know in advance that you want to install PhantomJS for a specific architecture,
you can set the environment variables: PHANTOMJS_PLATFORM
(to set target platform) and PHANTOMJS_ARCH (to set target
arch), where platform and arch are valid values for
process.platform and process.arch.

A Note on PhantomJS

PhantomJS is not a library for NodeJS. It's a separate environment and code
written for node is unlikely to be compatible. In particular PhantomJS does
not expose a Common JS package loader.

This is an NPM wrapper and can be used to conveniently make Phantom available
It is not a Node JS wrapper.

I have had reasonable experiences writing standalone Phantom scripts which I
then drive from within a node program by spawning phantom in a child process.

You can tell NPM and the PhantomJS installer to skip validation of ssl keys with NPM's
strict-ssl setting:

npm set strict-ssl false

WARNING: Turning off strict-ssl leaves you vulnerable to attackers reading
your encrypted traffic, so run this at your own risk!

I tried everything, but my network is b0rked. What do I do?

If you install PhantomJS manually, and put it on PATH, the installer will try to
use the manually-installed binaries.

I'm on Debian or Ubuntu, and the installer failed because it couldn't find node

Some Linux distros tried to rename node to nodejs due to a package
conflict. This is a non-portable change, and we do not try to support this. The
official documentation
recommends that you run apt-get install nodejs-legacy to symlink node to nodejs
on those platforms, or many NodeJS programs won't work properly.

Contributing

Questions, comments, bug reports, and pull requests are all welcome. Submit them at
the project on GitHub. If you haven't contributed to an
Medium project before please head over to the
Open Source Project and fill
out an OCLA (it should be pretty painless).

Bug reports that include steps-to-reproduce (including code) are the
best. Even better, make them in the form of pull requests.